


Frostbite

by etherati



Series: Watchmen Zombie!AU [15]
Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Borderline Necrophilia Wheee, Dan's List of Kinks, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, One Shot, Showers, Smut, Temperature Play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-31
Updated: 2010-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-08 13:58:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heating and freezing and all the room for living that falls in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frostbite

**Author's Note:**

> Zombie!verse.

*

“Where the hell have you _been?_”

Rorschach doesn’t answer, just stands there in the entryway in a daze, eyes under the mask unable to settle on anything for more than a second at a time. He doesn’t seem entirely sure where he _is_, much less where he’s been.

“You’ve been gone for two days, it’s eight goddamned degrees out there," and he might be overreacting; this is New York winter and not a polar expedition, but Rorschach knows better, at this point, than to scare him like this without a damn good reason. The leather of his coat is frozen solid at the shoulders, crumples under Dan’s grip with a crunch, and the meat under it feels even colder.

The mask works soundlessly. It’s pulling wrong, and he still doesn't seem to know what's happening.

“Hey,” Dan says, ducking to get a better look, the mounting unease of the last forty-odd hours crystallizing into a new shape. He's read all the medical journals, thumbed through in secret places, hidden in locked desk drawers. Knows what poor homeotherms they are, and how little margin they have between their own body temperature and the threshold of brain damage. The articles had been so abstract, so distant. “You okay in there?”

Rorschach tilts his head, incredulity in the gesture. The hat slips off, and no move is made to stop it. Dan frowns, puts his hands on either side of the mask, and the cold that’s radiating up through it is far deeper than it should be.

“God,” he says, splaying his fingers, mapping contours that feel picked out from ice, thumbs finding the edge of the mask. “You’re– do you care if I…”

“Nghhhh. Fine,” Rorschach says, and that he's responded at all is a good sign but he doesn’t really manage all the sounds, and it’s more like an exhalation with the guttural hiccup of a vowel in the middle. Nothing about his voice sounds right, and as the mask peels back, Dan understands why – the latex is frozen to skin in more than one place, sweat and condensation seizing up like glue between the layers. His lips are blue – the edge of his nose too, and ears, and his hair stays plastered to his scalp like it’s shellacked down.

A moment of quiet hesitation, in which Dan opens his mouth to say something he knows damn well Rorschach won’t have the patience for. Doesn’t say it, eyes fixing somewhere underneath the bruised and rough patches of torn skin.

If his face is this bad, then his fingers, his toes–

“Come on,” he says, steering the rigid statue toward the stairs; hopes his knees haven’t locked up. “Shower, now.”

*

By the time the water’s running hot, billowing steam into the closed-up room, Dan’s already gotten him out of his clothes – is halfway out of his own – and the fact that Rorschach’s beyond the point of even shivering isn’t a good sign. It’s as bad as he’d thought, skin bluer all over than it should be, extremities a blistering purple and nerveless against the tile floor, against the smooth paper on the wall where he’s bracing his weight. It isn't frostbite at least; they've seen this in carriers before, and it always looks worse than it is at this point–

(Once, in the winter of ’71, they’d watched a recent corpse fished out of the Hudson–)

–and getting his core temperature up is the priority, no matter how scary the rest of it seems.

“Go on.” Dan pulls back the curtain, maneuvers stiff limbs over the lip of the tub, encourages him forward into the water. His voice barely wavers. “I’ll be right in.”

For a moment, nothing about the noise floor of the running water but the shuffle of cloth over skin, the unfastening of a buckle or the run of a zipper, and Dan can imagine Rorschach drooping in the water like he always does, eyes closed, the most relaxed he ever allows himself to be. It’s a comforting picture.

But when Dan steps in behind him a few moments later, pulls the curtain closed with a snap, Rorschach still isn’t moving except to sway, half in the hot spray and half not, shoulders hunched in. His hair is still frozen to his scalp and Dan really doesn’t want to drench it – evaporating off, later, it’ll do nothing but chill him further – but it’s going to take more than steam to break the ice out of it and so Dan carefully tilts his head forward into the spray, working fingers through the frozen-over hair and cracking it apart.

The strands are stiff in his fingers, partially the cold and partially just the accumulated grime of being kept under the latex for two days straight, but as the water runs through they loosen, twist apart like unraveling rope. Dan doesn't bother with soap right now; just the steam and heat and it'll have to be enough, sensitized skin darkening in bruises everywhere his fingers land.

When it’s done, Rorschach has finally relaxed back against him, body molding into all the gaps and valleys in Dan’s like wax heated to running. Stillness, for a while. Dan can feel only the weight and heft of life melting into the hollow places between his hands and nothing else, and it's a salve on the last two days' fear, but the moment can't last.

"Had a lead," Rorschach mumbles, angling his face back towards Dan's, nestling into the curve of his throat, all raspy stubble and chill. "42nd Street underpass."

The underpass. God. Dan halts in place himself, eyes unfocusing. All over the news the last few nights, and the people disappearing under it alongside. All homeless, all carriers, and the police can't even put a name or a face to whatever phantom is responsible. None of the bodies have been found, but there've been rumors of deep freeze, of a cold, inescapable nightmare, hushed whispers around oildrums – and short of a chance encounter directly with the bastard, how could Rorschach possibly have found a _lead_–

"Did you catch him?" Dan asks, quiet, all but humming the words into Rorschach's temple, arms tightening around his chest.

A headshake, barely there. _No. _ And now he has started shivering.

“It’s okay,” Dan says, and it’s redundant but it feels necessary as he presses warmth in with hands and mouth and the solid length of his body, bracing Rorschach against the cleansing burn of the water, shielding him from the cold air behind them. He’s half-hard against the small of Rorschach’s back, but there are new bruises there that are not from the pounding of the water over heat-hungry flesh and that isn’t what this is about right now. He catches up one frozen hand between his own and carefully works to rub feeling back into it, fingertips lingering over every joint and pad of muscle, tracing paths of discoloration until they’re fading and disappeared. This is what matters; the night is gone and its monsters with it, and all of its victims need soothing in the hours before the dawn – every one.

Around blue feet, the water pools and swirls, carries things away.

Dan presses a kiss to the arch of Rorschach’s neck, and the shivering intensifies. “It’s okay.”

*

A rough toweling-off and Dan’s shoving him into the bed, following him under the blankets and yanking them up over both their heads like a child’s tent – but he’s outgrown reading by flashlight past his bedtime and the only light here is what filters in, diffuse, through the weave of the cotton. It casts them both as amorphous silhouettes, forms with no detail, like placeholders. That’s fine. It’s enough to see the dent Rorschach makes in space to know he’s there, stretched out underneath him, skin steaming wherever he touches – and now that he’s no longer in imminent danger of frostbite or brain damage, there’s nothing keeping Dan from falling back onto two days' fear, letting his hands and aching heart take it all in.

Palms smooth over Rorschach’s chest, mapping over the sharp angles and lines, using touch where vision fails. Rides them down to his hips, thumbs grazing along the widening trail of hair down from his navel. He can sense the restlessness in the twitch of skin, can catch the shift in Rorschach's eyes even without being able to properly see them; the moment when the survival craving for heat gives way to the need for touch and closeness and sensation, for the moment of breaking-apart that never hurts as much as it should. For the chance to rebuild with what's left, after.

[These transitions, between simple comfort and sex – they happen more quickly, more seamlessly these days than they ever have, stoked by some fire so deep they can't find it by sight, even in the dark.]

[Or maybe they've _always_ been the same thing, under all the pretense; practical contact lingering into casual touch ballooning into a need too hot to be contained.]

"You're still not warm enough," Dan mutters, but what he really means is closer to what his hands are saying, dragging rough and possessive over rock-cold planes of muscle that tense under the touch like a the warning arch of a predator's back. He doesn't back off. The body under him is carved of ice, and no matter how precious it is Dan still wants to feel water slipping out from under his hands – feel the body shatter into motion, to writhe against him and make the kinds of sounds only the breaking and broken understand. The heat doesn’t linger long on the skin but he tries to work it in anyway, work it deeper, and if he could sink his fingers down through flesh he would, just to lodge it further in. Slip in between ribs; around his heart and it could take all the warmth he has in him if only it would ever _stay. _

It never does; every patch of skin he abandons is cold as stone again when he returns to it, a shock of visceral pleasure against overheated nerves. “I thought you’d frozen to death out there,” Dan mumbles into skin, nosing in under Rorschach’s jaw, flattening his palm over the soft length of his cock. A tense whine is all the verbal response he gets, rising and falling as Rorschach latches onto his arms, rocks up against his hand, trying to find the right kind of friction.

“Thought of going out looking for you… finding you like that.” Dan takes his hand away (a soft noise of complaint, easily written off as anything, as nothing) and shifts down Rorschach's body, a shadow over a shadow – presses himself between damp thighs, holding them tight with his knees. He can feel one heavy thump of femoral pulse against his erection, and it is still too cold. His voice is strained, and the shivers are catching, and they're so _close_, all his heat leaching downward like falling naked into a snowbank. It's dizzying.

It's also a hell of a rush. Dan feels a thick bead of sweat ice its way down his temple, and the blankets shift with him, shuffling in time with his shallow rutting but not falling away. “Maybe behind a... aah, a dumpster or... something.”

Still no response; just a disapproving grunt through the tapestry of other sounds, and even Dan isn’t sure why he’s saying what he’s saying, why this is the moment for it. He isn’t angry, not now that he knows the reason, and it doesn’t sit like chastisement.

But he does feel compelled somehow, and he curls his fingers around Rorschach, thumb nudging the loose skin against all the too-raw nerves underneath. When Dan presses the length of him against the hot plane of his stomach, Rorschach bucks like something electrified, throat squeezing out a choked sob.

A hand grips at the bony hip, forcing it flat to the mattress, lingering like fire over the skin. Dan leans up on his knees and further back, just circling with the pad of his thumb, the blankets pulling into a high arch over his spine; his cock hangs heavily between them where it’s slipped free, aching in the open air. He doesn't reach for it. He can almost see, now. “Thought about having to come back here alone. Out of the cold, into nothing. Just...” Dan shakes his head. "...empty rooms."

A long silence but for the faint hitch of breath coming out of sync, and the almost audible ticking of a clock in the next room, seconds slipping away, irretrievable.

"Could happen at any time," Rorschach finally manages through the squirming heat, voice uneven – and Dan can tell he’s not just talking about freezing, not just talking about himself. "Live dangerous lives."

"Yeah, and if we make it long enough to retire we’ll just die of something else someday." The hand on Rorschach’s hip slides up to rest along his side, thumb soothing over the violent purple bruising.

It's nothing to a vigilante; he was in no danger really and it doesn't matter except that someone _tried_ to hurt him, that the desire was there, and for no reason other than a lapse in the wrong fight, against the wrong enemies, a split second of unguardedness that'd been exploited with teeth and blood. For no reason other than the play of cold against cold in a city choked by winter's grip, and what makes heat so sacrosanct, anyway?

Dan can feel the way his eyes are flashing even if he can't see, can feel the way his fingers twist just so because if there's no warmth to be found here he can at least pull passion free, incite abandon, light a different kind of fire. "It doesn’t mean we should just throw it all away now."

"...ahn," and it's barely there, just a thin vocalization that makes no pretense at carrying meaning. One hand claws behind him, buries itself under the pillow to brace against the back of his head and he _is_ sweating now, hipbone slick in Dan's grip.

"Only now matters," Dan says, ducking close again, a human-warm blanket with only enough space between them for his hand to work – and there it is, the crackling apart, the sound of thaw. Rorschach grinds up into his grip, free hand scrabbling at Dan's side and there is equilibrium for a moment, and Dan can't tell which of them is getting colder(dying) and which is getting warmer(living) but they are together here and it doesn't really matter. "Just…”

"...Daniel–" Rorschach hisses, interrupting, and it still sounds like an apology after all this time, so Dan cuts it off, catches it with his mouth, feeds it back wrapped in the warmth of his breath, transformed into something that needs no apologies, no forgiveness.

Between their bodies, a sharp motion, a hard rising from the mattress that shifts them both, that reshapes the blanket draped over them until it is small and shuddering and lost.

*

“Warmer now?” Dan's voice is muffled, face buried in Rorschach's throat, lips working over the gradually unknotting strings of muscle.

A short, broken exhale. “…yes.”

The blanket has drifted; Dan uses the hand he's not bracing himself with to tug it back into place, to seal the gaps. He feels overheated now, intensely so, blood beating in his ears and his temples, under every inch of skin.

“Good,” he says, resettling his weight, and there's something poetic in all of this, something that could be said about bringing winter into his bed and taming it – but that doesn't feel quite right, and he's still painfully hard in the cool hollow of Rorschach's hip. He'll take care of it later.

"This wasn't meant," he continues, voice low but with the sharpness of that tension; he shifts, and Rorschach shifts against him and his breath catches and hell, maybe it'll be sooner than later but right now he has to get this out. "...as a reward for bad behavior. You can't stay out in this kind of weather, not without shelter."

"Mn," Rorschach says, tipping his hips sideways and rolling them, making Dan bite his lip. "Will try not to in future. No promises," and Dan can hear it in his voice: he's not being difficult to be difficult. There are just no promises to make.

He said it before: They live dangerous lives. Unpredictable ones too, and sometimes the job is more important than safety.

Dan leans in, sliding against the rough chill, and it's so _good_ in a completely thought-dissolving way and he's not doing his argumentative skills any favors here, as half the words he knows slip right out of him – and he may hate the season with its icy sidewalks and brackish slush and endless nights but he's not entirely sure he _wants_ to see such a force of nature tamed, not when it's so electric to lie beside, to be covered over with, to let its teeth sink in until he can feel it in his bones. This piece of it right here, at least, he does not think he could do without.

"...guess that'll have to be good enough," he stutters out, as a cold hand closes around him and winter bites in deep at his throat and frost fills his joints, and this shadowed, silhouetted space under piled blankets is suddenly the only warm place left in the world.

*


End file.
